
Africa's Cowboy Capitalists
Ian Cox made his start in Rumbek, South Sudan, running an electronics shop he calls "the shittiest place in the world to do business," before a favor selling a friend's Land Cruiser in Juba led to an order for eleven more from a private security firm. Filmmaker Tim Freccia follows Cox and his hired crew in 2012 as they take on a bigger job: hauling a convoy of military-grade vehicles from South Africa to South Sudan for a UN-linked contract, a run through seven countries in thirty days. The film shows the checkpoints, bribe-seeking officials, and paperwork that make the trip a gauntlet, and it lays out why the cargo is so sensitive, since South Sudan's split from Sudan in 2011 left the region under an embargo that complicates moving anything resembling military equipment. Cox comes across less as an idealist than a hustler who has learned to work every angle of a broken system, and the footage of the convoy grinding through border after border makes the difficulty of that work concrete.